Tag Archive: poverty

What unites parents around the world is their dreams for their children – and just what they’re willing to do to see them fulfilled. In some places, that’s harder than most.

When Nozipho was born, her mother Mariah was on her own, a single mum with five other children to take care of.

That was in 1988. Due to a scarcity of transport in her part of Swaziland, Mariah had to give birth at home; there was no one to help her. Despite the difficulties, Mariah decided to call her last born Nozipho – meaning gift.

Mariah and her daughter Nozipho

Nozipho was a sweet little girl from the very beginning and everybody in the family loved her. She was very smart in school, topping other students year after year.

Amidst the hardship, Mariah was determined that her children should remain in school, even though there were times when the family went to sleep without eating food for days.

To cope, Mariah started farming, assisted by her six children who would weed and take care of the cotton plants until harvest time. With the money she received, Mariah made sure that there was food in the house, the children had clothes and their school fees were paid.

Nozipho and two of her siblings were also sponsored by World Vision which assisted the family – without the presence of World Vision in her community, Mariah would have struggled to keep her daughter in secondary school.

Nozipho certainly made the most of the opportunity. After graduating high school in 2004, Nozipho was accepted into university, where she embarked on a journalism and mass communications diploma. The Swazi government awarded her a scholarship for her three years of study. Now, Nozipho was able to support her mother.

During her first year at the university, Nozipho gave Mariah some of her government allowance to help buy wiring material for electricity installation. “It has been my wish to have electricity at home,” says Nozipho. Later, she was also able to give her mother money to plant maize so she could produce enough food for the family, as well as a 10,000 litre water tank.

Over the years, Mariah has benefited from various World Vision projects, using them to increase her skills – and help the local community. She remembers being taught how to make water harvesters using one bag of cement to help cope with times of low rainfall, a common problem in her area. With the skill she acquired, Mariah even assisted her neighbours and other people from other community to build water harvesters.

“I am always grateful to World Vision for the assistance that my family received over the years,” she says. As well as food rations and basics for the children, Mariah received a goat and fruit trees. In fact, the trees are doing so well, says Mariah that “every year they give fruits in abundance and we even sell some to our neighbours.”

Since Nozipho finished her post-secondary education, she has been working for a construction firm. With her salary, she is assisting her mother to take care of her six grandchildren who were left orphans after two of her children died.

As Nozipho looks to the future, she hopes to start her own consultancy firm. She is grateful to be able to take care of her ageing mother and her grandchildren.

When World Vision distributed hundreds of animals in Christine’s community in Uganda she thought she had missed out on an opportunity to improve life for her family.

Fortunately for Christine, there was another important part of this project that aimed to spread the benefits of raising animals to more and more families.

Each household that received a chicken, rooster and goat was asked to pass their first female offspring along to another family.

These acts of kindness would help countless more families to improve their livelihood and became the start of a pay-it-forward wave of change for this district in Uganda.

The livelihood project distributed one hen, rooster and goat to 600 households across the district as well as another 300 goats to other households and 40 male goats for communities to share.

Freddy Onguu, a livelihoods officer for the local project, explains that the idea of distributing animals is to improve the income and nutritional status of households in the district. “The project goal,” he explains, “is to enable families to meet their basic needs to live on a sustained basis.”

A gift from their neighbour
Christine’s family was grateful to receive the animals from their neighbor Korina after her livestock had their first female offspring.

A mother of five, Korina was crippled in 2008 and had found it hard to support her family. She received her chicken, rooster and goat in the first World Vision distribution.

Korina has already started to see the benefits of raising her animals. The goat and chickens are a source of nutritious food and she has sold some for extra money. This income has helped her to pay for school uniforms for her children.

Dreams of a bright future
Christine has sold the rooster Korina gave her, earning 35,000 shillings (RM43). Christine’s youngest son Tony, aged five, is happy that his mother has been able to use the income from their new animals to buy food including beans and sesame seeds. She has also bought school uniforms for Tony’s older siblings Fiona and Jimmy.

Christine dreams of a bright future with the income from their animals. “If the goats and chicken multiply, I would love to open up more land to cultivate,” says Christine.

When Christine too passes on the first offspring of her hen and goat another family will be able to earn a better income and enjoy better nutrition.

I’ve never thought that I would, or ever have a chance to go to India in my life. So I really didn’t know what to expect in this trip. And I was quite unsure on what I could actually do as me or as a part of World Vision.

But everything’s seems to be great and cool, I thought it was fun and I learned a lot. I’m gonna miss the curry, the crazy traffic, the children and families that we met, and everybody from Malaysia in our trip.

And thru the trip, I learned that poverty might be an issue for the people, but the toughest thing to see is people living with HIV, as it’s a serious issue in India. Some of these people lose their health, some lose their loved ones, and it just changes their future somehow. A lot of them suffer because of HIV, then it affects their financial support and also children’s education…

Thankfully World Vision has helped this community a lot, in terms of healthcare, medication, education, financial and social supports, to decrease the number of HIV and poverty. And to increase the awareness about HIV, at least everybody understands that the innocent people who are infected should have the same treatment.

So we really hope all of us who are more blessed, can give a hand to World Vision, to help these people.